Agile Finance Series #2 - Cost Savings

Welcome to part 2 of the Agile Finance Series. In this video we cover cost savings and driving efficiency across the organisation.

Transcript 

Liam:

Hi there, Liam here from VantagePoint. Thank you very much for watching our video 2 in the COVID-19 series. This video is really about cost savings and driving efficiency across the organisation. We know this is one of the key things that we've looked at, and also we've looked at for a couple of clients very recently. This might not always seem I think, and I want to address that straight away, like an obvious thing to do to really think at this time but, how can we do things better? But there are multiple ways that you can drive efficiency by looking at your people, processes and systems that will directly contribute to those cost savings as well.

I think that the reluctance to embark on improvement projects has been felt for us in some areas, but some people have also really been making strides in saving cost and driving efficiency by doing this at this time. Matt, so on this called, cost-saving and efficiency piece. What have you seen that's really been working for our clients at the moment?

Matt:

Yeah. So first of all, I think to lead on from your point is that cost-saving is very topical and cost-saving isn't always necessarily about scrutiny on cash. It isn't necessarily about increasing margin by cutting really obvious near-term costs. Some of our clients are looking a little bit further than that, and that's where these efficiency reviews that we sometimes do with our clients, or our clients just do independently, can be a really effective way to cut your cost base in the longer term, but also promote efficiency. So there are two main areas that we encourage our clients to look at in finance, if they're doing an efficiency review and the first one would be, and it's fairly obvious, technology. What technology are you using? What challenges are there, what is it costing you? And how could you improve/change any of the above?

Matt:

The second is around processes and those processes often link into the technology and systems you're using, but sometimes they're a little bit wider than that. So look at the core processes within your finance function and how can those be streamlined. So both technology and process efficiency. The other thing that we'd really encourage you to do, and some organisations like to get external parties in support with the process. We don't need to do that, just made sure that whoever's responsible for that process day to day, isn't the person that's doing the review. You'll just find you're able to extract more meaningful insight and slightly more objective insight as well. So they are just a few pointers I guess, if you're starting to think about doing some kind of efficiency process system review.

Liam:

Great, so I guess we don't want people kind of marking their own homework. Obviously, it's a very obvious one, with any kind of efficiency review or a cost saving exercise. And then I definitely think that, although it's definitely a time from a cost saving perspective to think about how you do this in an efficient way and not overspend, but not still rule out the fact that you do it and not be too kind of head down and focus just on cutting really obvious costs. I think even if, for a lot of businesses we speak to, if they look at a lot of the technologies they have, there's some of them that they could just end those licenses and maybe consolidate a couple of different licenses together into one technology where they'd make massive saving gains, not only in the short term, but in the medium and longer term as well. Brilliant, is there anything else to add on this point?

Matt:

No, I think just the point on add-on, lessons learned from where we've done efficiency reviews is, trying to break it up into bite size chunks - don't do too much at once, but do wrap an overall plan around it, so have a five to 10 week plan of areas you'd like to target to give yourself momentum all the way through. But try and break your finance operation down into bite size chunks and address them individually. So it doesn't become overwhelming, but you also not losing the momentum over that five to ten week period.

Liam:

Perfect. Okay, great. That is it for video 2. Thank you very much for watching. I'll see you in next video. Bye-bye.

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